Use All the Crayons!: The Colorful Guide to Simple Human Happiness

Copyright © 2013 by Chris Rodell

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ISBN: 978-1-9389-0850-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9389-0851-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013917557

iUniverse rev. date: 10/7/2013

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Reading Instructions

Acknowledgments

About the Author

This Book Is Free

That’s right. Free. Anyone who wants a copy mailed to his or her home, no charge, is welcome to one. Just ask.

Author Chris Rodell, of course, encourages you to buy it and hopes you’ll support him and the people who distribute, promote, and sell books. But if you’re one of those Americans who are out of work and having a tough time, or if you know a US serviceman or woman who might benefit from a book that aims to brighten daily lives, then Rodell wants you to get in touch at storyteller@chrisrodell.com.

He doesn’t believe a book that, at its heart, aims to help people be happy should be withheld from anyone over a few dollars. It’s said the best things in life—love, friendship, laughter—are free, Rodell says. I don’t presume that this book is one of the best things in life but, by God, there’s nothing to say it can’t keep good company.

To Josie and Lucy

Foreword

One of my neighbors in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Chris Rodell, has dropped into my office from time to time over the last decade or so to conduct a variety of friendly interviews and, once a year, to drop off some copies of his golf desk calendar with its daily gems that I often find informative and frequently amusing. Many of his interviews have wound up on our ArnoldPalmer.com website or in our publication, Kingdom Magazine.

I thought I had gotten to know Chris fairly well from those many visits, but I really hadn’t realized the true extent of his literary talents until I had a chance to see a draft of his latest book. Use All the Crayons! is an interesting and amusing trip through precisely 501 wide-ranging tips on life surrounding thirty-three short essays that are thoughtful and insightful.

Who would have thought to wonder what would happen to a traveling knight in shining armor when he showed up at airport security? Or suggest that, while standing on a busy street corner, you scream into your cell phone: No! No! No! The incision should be made behind the left ear!

That’s the sort of fun reading you will find in these pages, taking you to Tip No. 501—Learn the fine art of knowing precisely when to quit. I think you will enjoy what appears on all the pages that lead to that fitting conclusion.

—Arnold Palmer

Preface

Self-help authors offer an endless supply of books aimed at making you, the reader, a happier and more well-rounded individual. If you’ve bought these books and they’ve fulfilled all they promised, we’re sorry because people tend to be suspicious of happy people. They think they’re up to something. Bailed-out bankers tend to be happy. Anyone alert enough to pay attention to the news ends up figuring that happiness, at least on this planet, must be an unnatural state of mind. How can anybody be happy when so many of our fellow men and women are miserable.

This book doesn’t promise to make you happy, but it’ll make you more fun and more interesting—more colorful. A healthy and aware happiness is bound to ensue. Happy people, you see, aren’t necessarily colorful, but colorful people are universally happy. People resent happy people. They invite colorful people to all the coolest parties.

I’ve never had a lot of money. In fact, for many, many years, my idea of a splurge has been to order a pizza with pepperoni and sausage. But since kindergarten, I’ve never lacked for friends, laughs, or love. I’m no smarter than most, less ambitious than all but a handful, and I’m freighted with a God-given laziness that has stifled any natural abilities others would have successfully exploited to their prosperous advantage.

About five years ago, just as America began hitting a historic rough patch, it began to dawn on me that things weren’t working out so well for me either. I was constantly broke. Anticipated breakthroughs never materialized. I’d once been considered a promising young writer. With my forty-fifth birthday behind me, I was no longer young, and any promise seemed to have vanished.

That was all a bit surprising to an optimist like me. But what was even more surprising was how pleased I was with my joyful little life. I was happy. I had a lovely wife and two beautiful daughters. We had a host of dedicated friends and seemed to attract squads of lively new ones with carefree frequency. Each day was filled with laughter and fun.

As a freelance writer, I’d awoken unemployed for the past twenty years with a natural obligation to find something fun or lucrative to do. I was paid meager sums to write scattered features and occasional essays for magazines like Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health, Golf, and other top magazines. It sounds prestigious, but the reality is I haven’t earned more than $21,700 during the last four years—and just a bit more than half that in the lampblack days of 2009. With professional prospects dim, I turned to blogging, the last refuge of the underemployed writer who still believes he has something to say. I called my blog www.EightDaysToAmish.com, a grim nod to the fact that I always seemed like I was a little over a week away from having to do things like churn my own butter and try raising two sassy daughters without things like electricity or gas-powered transportation.

On some days I’d work.

Many days I did not. Neither did my darling wife. She did part-time editing jobs and became one of those maniacal coupon clippers, the tearing din of scissors snipping paper becoming the soundtrack of our evenings.

Like America, we were broke. We’d pilfered most of our savings. We cut back on insurance and health care. Every gauge we’d been conditioned to check said we should have been unhappy, distraught, angry. Yet we were not. For anyone raised to equate income with self-worth, it was a little disorienting.

Money wasn’t buying our happiness.

What was?

I decided to make a little list. I jotted down the things that made me laugh or feel soulful. For instance, I’d play precocious little pranks on my unsuspecting wife. She’d recruit our daughters in score-evening schemes. I daydreamed about how the world could be a better place—fax leftovers to the starving (see no. 334)!—and I wrote down what I thought. The little list began to grow.

You’re holding the result in your hands.

We, as a nation, remain mired in the midst of a historically difficult time. Many of us are out of work or underemployed. Yet, some of us continue to steadfastly confound the pollsters by saying we’ve never felt more optimistic about our shared futures. We believe we’ve survived the worst and our best days still lie ahead.

Maybe we’re simultaneously discovering that the excesses of the past decades weren’t what mattered. It’s all the little moments of mortar between the big ones that do. Here are five hundred tips that will give your day a little jolt of joy. Feel free to work the suggestions into your world and add your own.

Rich or poor, it’s up to each of us to color our lives as we see fit. We can sketch them out in uniformly dark colors or we can use all the crayons.

It’s up to you.

I hope to see you at the party.

Introduction

Charcoal and lampblack: those were the only two colors the company that would grow to be Crayola Crayons produced when it was founded in 1864. And it took good lighting and a discerning eye to differentiate between the two. Today, the children who use Crayola products can choose from more than 120 different colors, including Azure, Laser Lemon, and Razzmatazz. What child isn’t glad to be alive in such a vibrant age? The company, which now earns more than $100 million each year, says the average child will wear down more than 730 crayons before he or she turns ten years old.

Like a box of crayons, we are all born with an astounding range of color options, from Mauvelous to Tickle Me Pink. We can paint our lives as brightly or dimly as we choose—but through life, some of us lose or wear down some of our more dazzling colors, living each and every day as if it were either charcoal or lampblack.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Nor should it. Use All the Crayons! is your uplifting, humorous, spiritual guidebook about how to make every day as vivacious as Atomic Tangerine to illuminate even your most lampblack days.

Reading Instructions

This book avoids chronological construction that may have helped ease confusion. Flow is random, logic evasive.

Each item, whether historical, current, or futuristic, took about thirty seconds to type. By that narrow calculation, the book you’re holding took about four hours and seventeen minutes to compose. My recollections suggest it took a good bit longer.

Once typed, I didn’t deign to put any of the items in any mystical order; there are no hidden codes that once deciphered lead to greater intellectual or materialistic treasures. It is what it is.

Persons referred to in the text may on one page be eight years old and then on a later page travel back to when they were just four. At some parts, the stories suggest my office is in a basement, and in others it is above a friendly tavern. Do not let the change of location inebriate your mental equilibrium. It doesn’t matter. It is helpful, but not necessary, to read first the items preceding the Colorful Days Diary extrapolations and treat both the way polite people treat an introduction to a married couple; that means being simultaneously attentive to both.

Other than that one suggestion, the book is nimble in its options for any readers eager to engage it. It can be read the traditional way or in reverse. You can open pages at random or create some numerical-based routine—spend one reading session perusing only the items divisible by seven—understood only by you. Or you can start at the last page and go in reverse.

The book is not a mystery. There’s no surprise ending. The butler didn’t do it. Backwards or forwards, either way really isn’t that important. I think the best way to explore what follows is with an open mind, a playful heart, and without any ambition that any of it is ever going to make perfect sense.

Sort of like life.

1. Make time for the important things—and consult a nearby five-year-old anytime you forget what’s important.

Colorful Days Diary

Resignation mingled with euphoria when I heard my daughter describe to her friends just what her daddy does for a living. She and her little trio of chums were busily cluttering the kitchen table with colorful scraps of construction paper while I was cluttering the nearby countertop with discarded wheat bread crusts that would have rendered peanut butter and jelly sandwiches inedible to the quartet of five-year-olds.

It’s a conversation all children get around to, and I was standing right there when the little redheaded neighbor girl brought it up.

What’s your daddy do? Mine helps sick people, she said with estimable pride.

They went right around in a little circle.

Mine fixes cars.

He builds homes.

Then, in a matter-of-fact voice, my beloved daughter drove a stake through any remaining ambitions I’d nurtured that one day I might achieve something notable in my profession. What does her daddy do?

He plays with me.

My first thought was, Man, that’s not going to look good on the loan applications.

I should have seen it coming. For the past few years, the dawning day would greet me with the very same challenge: achieve or enjoy?

During that time, the record was clear: if I chose to enjoy, I succeeded every time.

I’d go golfing, fish, picnic with the family, and revel in the simple joys of being a father. That meant I’d drop whatever I was doing the instant my daughter marched down the stairs into my basement office with her Barbie dolls and said, Daddy, let’s play, with a voice that left no room for artful refusal.

There are few things more entertaining than fully engaging a wound-up five-year-old at play. In my basement office where I earn my living writing stories about unusual events for offbeat news sources (Town Saved by Giant Ball of Twine! … What People Named Pat Downs Think about Airport Pat-Downs), I’ve seen things too amazing for jaded editors to believe. For instance, I’ve seen my daughter fly. I’ve